When Plaid launched in 2013, its aim was to better integrate banking with the internet.
Now, a dozen years later, the fintech giant connects more than 10,000 U.S. banks and financial institutions to apps such as Venmo, SoFi, Crypto.com, Acorns, Robinhood, H&R Block and Citi. It’s fundamentally transformed the way Americans move, save and invest money.
“We built the plumbing,” CEO and co-founder, Zach Perret, told NYNext. “One in two Americans have linked a bank account through Plaid.”
While maintaining the system is essential, Perret is just as focused on modernizing it — catching the United States up to peers in Europe and Asia with instant payments and fully digital transfers, and hardening it against a new wave of AI-driven fraud.
“If we have fraudsters using AI to, [for example], create deepfakes, then we have to have AI fighting the deepfakes on the other side,” Perret said. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game.”
Part of the challenge for Plaid — founded a decade before generative AI tools began reshaping both commerce and crime — is retrofitting its infrastructure with machine-learning defenses.
To make the shift, Perret has made AI fluency a core skill for every engineer at the company.
“We’ll train you and give you all the tools you need to succeed,” Perret said, because, “come a year or two from now, if you’re not using these tools it’s going to be a problem.”
With a network spanning thousands of financial institutions across a huge swath of the fintech ecosystem, Plaid can spot fraud patterns earlier and at greater scale than most individual companies. That’s become increasingly important, as fraud losses topped $12.5 billion in 2024 — a 25% jump from the year before, according to the FTC.
“We can give companies like Coinbase the tools that they need to fight back,” Perret said.
If AI-driven fraud is a threat from the outside, the U.S.’s outdated payment methods are a threat from within.
America has been slow to overhaul decades-old systems, and we’re currently lagging behind Singapore, India, Brazil and the European Union when it comes to the speed at which money can be transferred.
“In the U.S., it still takes three-to-five days to move money from one bank account to another,” Perret said. “There’s a very real economic cost [i.e. delaying payrolls, tying up working capital for businesses] to not modernizing that infrastructure quickly.”
Promising initiatives like the Federal Reserve’s FedNow instant payment system, launched in July 2023, have had uneven results. In its first two years, 1,400 of roughly 4,000 eligible banks have registered with the system and participation remains voluntary.
“Consumers are going to be left behind,” Perret warned.
Closing the gap isn’t just a matter of adapting technologies — it also requires regulatory momentum.
Plaid has maintained a team in D.C. for the past six or seven years and Perret himself travels there quarterly to explain issues, give tutorials and advocate for change.
“I talk to lawmakers, to regulators, to everyone that’s interested to explain [that] financial services, data connections, they matter a lot, [they] allow people to have more economic and financial freedom,” he said.
These conversations are ongoing and key questions remain: How should sensitive financial data be shared? What access rights do consumers have? Must responsibility for fraud prevention be divided among banks, fintech platforms and users?
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For Perret, these are urgent matters.
“We’re right on the precipice,” he said. “There are steps that we can take — together as a country — over the next few years that will be hugely transformational.”
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